Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not wish to in any way impugn your judgement, but clearly in my mind if we do not have the money to give these people then all we can do is give them a meagre $350. If this country were enjoying the great wealth that we should be enjoying, we would have that money.

Let me be very specific now and talk about young couples. Before the time of Mr Keating and this free market rubbish we had a fair tax system. I remember as a young man having three kids and one income. My wife, with three kids, really had to stay at home. I paid virtually no tax at all because there were big tax deductions for those kids. Today Australia has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 10 or 12 years time there will be more deaths than births in this country. We are a vanishing race. A husband and wife with three kids on one income are going to get $350 as a result of this bill. After having $15,000 taken out in tax, they are left with $55,000 a year. Then they have accommodation expenses, which are roughly $18,000, on average, in Australia. So, after tax and accommodation, that family of five is left with $37,000. That works out to $7,000 per person. I would like to see you raise a child on $7,000 a year. Is it any wonder that young people—those that can add up—are saying, 'I can't afford to have a kid'? They can't. It is impossible. A double income, no kids couple earning $140,000—two people on $70,000—pays about $35,000 in tax. That leaves them with $105,000. Taking out accommodation expenses, again, of $18,000 leaves them with $87,000, which is $43,000 per person. The question is: is this a fair system? We give families $350 and expect them to live on $7,000 per person, but we let the DINKs live on $43,000 per person.

I look back with great joy at my family's association with the Labor movement, which delivered a fair system to Australia under which young, struggling families, such as my own at the time, paid virtually no tax. When I was a single man working at the mines in Mount Isa, I paid a fair whack of tax—and so I should have, because I was on huge money. But that is not the fairness of the system now. The fairness of the system now is that young families are crucified in this country. Giving them $350 is not going to solve their problem when they have to try to keep a child alive on $7,000 a year. That will be good fun; that will be certainly a challenge.

God gave us a really wonderful country with very great riches. We are endowed with an ability to produce all of our petrol from ethanol. We are endowed with a country where we could produce all of our petrol from our gas supplies. We are endowed with a country that has coal and iron ore in an abundance that probably no other country on earth has. We have a country that was producing 15 per cent of our entire export earnings from wool when we were intelligently and aggressively marketing that product. We were a country that could feed itself. We were a country that built motor cars. None of those things are true now, and everybody in this parliament knows they are not true. They will not be true unless you make fundamental changes in policy and go back to having the aggressive, highly competitive economy that we once had, not apologising or bowing and scraping and trying to pretend to the rest of the world that we are the great free marketeers—that we are so fair-minded. We are bloody fools for being looked at that way by the rest of the world, and our young people are paying the penalty. (Time expired)

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